It is often necessary, when carpeting a large area, such as a wide floor, with wall-to-wall carpeting, to seam together two or more widths of carpeting in order to cover the entire area. This is because carpeting is manufactured and sold in standard widths that are often smaller than the areas which are to be carpeted. In a conventional face-seaming process, the seam between two carpet pieces is created by cutting the adjoining carpet pieces to create clean edges for seaming, abutting the clean edges, and joining the closely abutting edges of carpeting together using a hot-melt carpet seaming tape.
Because it is desirable to make the seams between the pieces of carpeting as invisible as possible, it is important that the edges of the carpeting to be joined be cleanly cut without cutting or snagging yarns in the carpet pile. Face cutting, in particular, can be difficult since the space between rows of carpet pile is often small. Simply laying a straight edge along the top of the carpeting and cutting downward with a blade through the carpeting pile and backing, for example, typically produces unsatisfactory results. When carpeting is face cut--that is, from the pile side--tufts of pile fibers will inevitably be snagged and cut as they are trapped between the backing and the blade. These missing fibers will make the seam visible. The effect is the same as if one took a small pair of scissors and cut some of the pile along a line: producing a cut area which will be clearly visible.
One method for avoiding this difficulty is by using a guide rail for cutting in a relatively straight line from the top of carpeting through the backing between the pile fibers. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,621,573 to Summers a guide rail rests on the top surface of the carpet backing between the pile fibers, and a blade aligned with the guide rail extends downward to cut through the carpeting as the guide rail moves over it. In Canadian patent 907,305, a rug cutting tool which has two parallel guides on either side of the tool body includes a blade disposed between the two plates for cutting down through the carpet between two rows of pile fibers. However, such cuts, which pass through the center of the gap between two rows of pile, when joined in a seam, there is frequently a gap between the adjacent rows of pile of the two carpet pieces, indicating the presence of a seam.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,543,400 to Scott et al. discloses a cutter for face cutting of loop pile carpet having a floor engaging base, a forwardly facing carpet receiving slot above the base, which is spanned at the rear of the slot by an inclined left-hand or right-hand cutting blade for cutting close to the carpet pile on the left-hand or right-hand side. The effect is to reduce the size of the gap between the piles of the abutting edges of two pieces of carpet to be joined in a seam, thus reducing the visibility of the seamed area. However, the Scott et al. patent has a number of deficiencies. Scott et al. provide a recess or notch in the floor engaging base for the lowermost corner of the lowered blade. As cutting progresses, the notch or slot fills with small cuttings and latex fillers. The cuttings tend to pack to the outside, causing the corner of the blade to deflect to the inside, increasing the inaccuracy of the cut and making it difficult, when the cut is complete, to replace or reset the blade to the extended position. In some instances, the lowermost corner of the blade can be forced up, out of engagement with the slot, requiring termination of the cutting procedure before it is completed. Cutting cannot be resumed until the blade is removed and the slot cleaned using a pick-like instrument.
Furthermore, Scott et al. provides a pair of shoulders that the bottom surface of the blade rests against. These shoulders can cause binding of the blade, making it difficult to advance or retract the blade when desired, and can permit some undesirable movement of the blade during cutting which, again, increases the inaccuracy of the cut. Finally, Scott et al. does not provide any positive means for accessing the blades to enable them to be moved into the advanced or retracted position.
Accordingly, the need exists for an improved carpet cutter which can be used for face cutting carpeting, and which avoids the accumulation of cuttings, prevents deflection of the blade for increased accuracy of cuts, and provides easy access to the blades.